GOES-15 First Infrared Imager Data

April 2010

The first official GOES-15 full-disk infrared images were broadcast on 26 April 2010 at 1730 UTC. The images here were all created from data acquired from a GOES ingest system on the top of building 33 at NASA GSFC.

These pictures are presented as the radiometer sees them: clouds appear bright in reflected sunlight in the VIS channel, but dark in the emissive IR channels because the brightest things in the scene are the warm land surfaces. The IR3 channel is blocked from seeing the ground by water vapor in the atmosphere. So, the brightest areas in this band indicate warm, dry slots in the atmosphere, usually where the atmosphere has folded down around weather fronts. The VIS Moon is a bit skewed by its apparent motion while being scanned back-and-forth by the Imager. The infrared view of the moon is so hot that it is off-scale in the temperature range used for Earth-scanning.

Mosaic of all five Imager channels, plus two time series showing the moon emerging from behind the southern hemisphere. From left to right, top row: 0.6 micron band channel (VIS), 6.7 micron water vapor channel (IR3), 10.7 micron channel (IR4). Bottom row: 3.9 micron channel (IR2), time series visible channel, time series 3.9 micron channel, 13.3 micron channel (IR6).
larger, 3MB tiff

A three-image time-series from the GOES-15 Imager shows the moon moving out from behind Earth. Images from 25 April 2010 at 1615, 1630 and 1645 UTC. Visible channel images on the left, 3.9 micron (IR2) on the right.
larger visible Channel, 8MB tiff

Contrast enchanced individual channel images, with links to large versions.

Sectors as created by the gvar processing software are available in a sector directory.

Note that as of April 28, a bug in our software results in incorrect processing of IR6 channel images, which have every other line missing. The images in the sector directory are raw counts scaled to fit a 2-byte integer.